• 1818: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who engineers a living creature in a hideous experiment. The novel is seen as a warning against the expansion of science without a moral context.
• 1870: Jules...

• 1949: George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four during the Cold War. The book is set in a future Britain where the government monitors all private and public activity.
• 1950: I, Robot is a collection of short storie...

Science fiction emerged about 300 years ago when science made great strides. Authors tried to understand their world by imagining a possible future.

• 1984: William Gibson blurs the boundary between human and machine in Neuromancer. Gibson's "console cowboys" chase each other through a virtual space known as the "matrix". Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" and is known for his prophetic visions ...

• 1962: JG Ballard's The Drowned World is the first of his novels dealing with ecocatastrophes. He deals with the idea of societal breakdown after the polar ice caps have melted.
• 1968: The futuristic novels of Philip K Dick ...

• 1974: Doris Lessing published a tale of post-apocalyptic societal breakdown in the novel Memoirs of a Survivor.
• 1975: Academic and feminist Joanna Russ wrote The Female Man. She describes a positive community of wo...